Today's commercial aircraft cabins are designed to accommodate crew members in special rooms. More precisely such rooms may be designed as so-called crew rest compartments or rest modules which belong, according to statutory provisions, to the mandatory equipment of airplanes for long distance flights. Therefore, according to international standards for long distance flights, for flights with a time duration of 8 to 14 hours there may be a need for one arrangement to lay down and for flights with more than 14 hours two arrangements to lay down are needed. This is caused by the requirement, that by exceeding a certain time duration of the flight there must be two entire flight crews on board of the airplane.
It shall be noted, that the term crew rest compartment and crew, always may consider the flight crew of an aircraft as well as the cabin crew of an aircraft. This of course does not exclude, that other persons may use the inventive rest module.
During the recent years the security demands in airplanes have been increased rapidly, which also includes the securing separation of the cockpit area from the passenger area. From a constructing point of view it might therefore be desirable that the flight crew has a direct spatial access to such a flight crew rest compartment (FCRC) from the cockpit area, without the need to cross the passenger area. Beyond this, security requirements like for example being fireproof or bullet-proof may arise or be important for the construction of such crew rest compartments.
Today's commercial flight crew rest compartments are realized in the ceiling area, the so-called crown area of the airplane with two adjacent sleeping arrangements. In most of these realizations the flight crew has to pass a certain way in order to reach the flight crew rest compartment. On the one hand the habitation area in the inner side of these compartments is commonly very narrow and on the other hand the following passenger area for example the so-called first class area is commonly very commodious and spatially wide. Such a first class area may eventually not offer the full technical height over the whole area. That may further mean, that a CRC (crew rest compartment) can optically influence the appearance of the cabin design.
Further on known solutions of crew rest compartments or flight crew rest compartments do not provide a spatial division or separation between different cabins for single crew members and are therefore not optimally designed in the sense of room and space configuration. The privacy may therefore not be provided during a rest session of an user.
In the past any solutions for CRCs or FCRCs provided two sleeping arrangements. Because the crew is joined by a second pilot in only 70 to 80% of the flights, the second bed and all its appropriate components may be transported unnecessarily. The second bed may require a lot of storage or loading space which volume may be urgently needed in airplanes. Further on the additional fraction of the weight of the airplane has just now to be avoided during times, when wide body airplanes become more important.
In difference to the solutions for the flight crew the compartments of the cabin crew are for example arranged at the rear end of the airplane. With this configuration of the two compartments there normally arises the need for two different ladders or aids in ascending.
In recent times where the reduction of the emission of exhausts becomes more and more important additional mass, volume and components especially in crew rest compartments should be avoided.